Re-reading 'Middlemarch'

After many many years, I decided to re-read George Eliot’s masterpiece Middlemarch this summer. What a pleasure. I took my time, and such leisurely progress seemed just right for this densely-woven series of interlinked narratives.

What an achievement it is: the prose style, the humour (I had forgotten how funny she so often is), the vast range of vividly-drawn characters, the philosophical profundity, the portrait of a densely-interconnected community, the historical forces in the background, and so much more.

I used the Könemann two-volume edition: nice to hold in the hand without any challenge to the wrist. A small irritation is that all the notes are in Volume 2, so you can’t immediately access Volume 1 notes in that book.

A few recent resources:

• Mona Simpson led a Substack book club on the novel in 2023: scroll through her always intelligent posts here. Chapter One.

• There’s a Reddit book club on the novel, A Year of Middlemarch, with weekly posts through the year.

• David Frum’s essay on re-reading the novel is excellent (warning: spoilers early on before he gets to his analysis).

• David Runciman’s Past Present Future podcast has two top-class episodes devoted to Middlemarch as part of his series on political books. Player for Part 1 at the bottom (starting with the threat of cholera); here’s Part 2.

• Rebecca Mead’s story of personal connections with the novel, The Road to Middlemarch: my life with George Eliot, came out in 2014. A review by Lucy Scholes: ‘a deeply sympathetic and intelligent account of one woman’s “profound experience with a book”, without doubt a love letter to Eliot’s masterpiece, but also an important meditation on how our life experiences shape our reading, and our reading shapes how we choose to live our lives.’ Some might like more of Middlemarch and less of Mead, but it’s always readable.

• Rohan Maitzen’s site Middlemarch for Book Clubs.